patternsinnoise asked:
Just wanted to say: Neoreaction a Basilisk is an absolute banger of a book. I know plans change and all, but I hope you end up writing the monograph on cyberpunk you've mentioned in passing a few times.
i hear sneer club is popping off
awful.systems is federated!!
you can read it from other Lemmy instances!
you probably can’t read it from mastodon right now, because lemmy doesn’t implement authorized_fetch - bah.
if nothing else works, create an account locally.
here’s the federation announcement, please report anything weird.
we have a few posts a day in c/sneerclub and c/techtakes, it’s pretty nice
elsandifer answered:
Thank you so much for the kind words.
I wrote the 1980s section, then moved on to Last War in Albion for a bit, then largely decided to downsize the amount of criticism I was doing in favor of comics and fiction. Which currently includes a cyberpunk novel, so the underlying ideas aren’t dead, but I would be surprised if I return to that specific project.
I might, however, be writing a monograph about Alan Turing that plays with a lot of the ideas of both cyberpunk and NAB.
Let’s see if you can still road test arguments by dangling them here and seeing if any feral rationalists attack
Artificial General Intelligence is likely not possible on Turing Machine level computers. The underlying idea that it is—which, given the Church-Turing Thesis, is also a claim that general intelligence can be reduced purely to algorithmically solvable math problems—is deeply unlikely in the first place given that physics doesn’t reduce to those.
It’s far more likely that intelligence as we understand it is an intrinsically biological phenomenon emerging out of the innate sense of self that even unicellular organisms demonstrate via things like self-preservation. Adding a certain level of cognitive complexity to a biological system eventually trips into (or at least can lead to) consciousness. This is not to deny that consciousness is a purely materialist phenomenon—I have no particular dog in that fight—but it is to say that it emerges from something more complex than raw mathematics, and with a biological component, such that an AGI is simply not possible until, at a minimum, we’ve learned how to construct biological computers that are meaningfully alive.
by Amy Castor and David Gerard
- Mashinsky’s backside headed toward jail, where it belongs
- Actually good news for Ripple
- Hotdog guy, but it’s triplets
- Don’t ask me, I’m just a celebrity!
The SSL Smiley Song ˙ ͜ʟ˙
Sing it with me:
Dashing through the cloud
On a ten gigabit link
One packet in a crowd
Falls into the data sink!
Draw a smiley face
On the diagram
Suck up data, leave no trace
It's all for Uncle Sam!
SSL terminators at the datacenter
Just gotta get on the other side
Just gotta break and enter!
No need to hack that server rack
Just gotta tap that fiber
Download all the private data
Win the war on CYBER!
SOURCES: THE DIAGRAM RELATED NONSENSE
This is my real voice. I swear I am an adult
genuinely friendly reminder to never EVER share someone’s location/information without their explicit permission. you do not know why that person is asking, what they plan to do with that information, or even if the asker has that person’s best interest in mind at all.
OP is also not exaggerating how common this is. my abusive parents successfully kidnapped me from work once because a coworker who didn’t know my situation told them when my next shift was. my parents didn’t even know where I lived at that point in time, which was very much on purpose. it took me days to get away again. ALWAYS tell the person that is being looked for that someone is looking. never share personal information or even how to get in contact them. you can take information in and pass it along, but you absolutely cannot give any out.
[image descriptions: screencap of tweets from rahaeli @rahaeli 7/9/21.
Hello friends, your regular reminder that a not insignificant number of social media “missing person” efforts are actually someone’s abuser trying to get them back, especially with missing older teens. Please don’t share unofficial missing person flyers–
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen a site wide “missing person” turn into the person writing in to ask us to enforce the restraining order, or the custodial parent begging us to shut down the non custodial parent’s attempted kidnapping
Every time I say this, someone says “but what if it’s real, better safe than sorry” and no, it absolutely is not. For a good while I got “this is my abuser, please make them stop” requests for 70-80% of the viral unofficial missing persons crossing my feed.
This number is obviously anecdata–I’ve never been able to find a peer reviewed study attempting to pin down prevalance. But based on those experiences, I absolutely advise never sharing one of those posts.
(I used to finish this PSA thread saying that if a missing person alert came from police or a federal agency, it had likely been screened for abusive tactics and was more likely to be real. I no longer say this.)
This should be your principle for any time someone wants you to connect them with someone else, btw. Never give someone’s info to the person who asked. Tell the asker you’ll give that third party THEIR contact info instead.
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I will probably be muting this in a bit, but some followup: for those questioning “just how often does this happen, even?”, I wasn’t keeping an exact count but I think we just hit double digits of people saying “this happened to me/a friend” in replies to QTs of this
As in, of the current 70 or so quote tweets, around 10% of them have a person telling a story about a time their abuser faked a social media post expressing concern over them as a missing/vulnerable person in order to continue abusing them.
It’s not rare. It’s not unusual. It is, in fact, vastly more common than *any* dangerous situation in which social media attention can do literally anything to improve the situation. (I’ve rarely seen a dangerous situation massive social media attention can improve, honestly.)
To the people who want to argue about this advice: I have, more than once, personally seen an abuser’s viral missing persons post end in suicide or homicide. I have never in 20 years seen a case of stranger kidnapping at all, much less one that’s resolved by virality.
All I’m asking you to understand is that the abusers who do this are very, very good at convincing you their “missing person” is irrational, in danger, or has diminished capacity. You will never be able to spot these situations by reading over a single post. Ever.
If you want to retweet missing personsviral alerts because you want to do good in the world, please understand that there is a much, much greater statistical chance you are *actually* contributing to making things much worse for the person instead. Please just think about that.
And to answer the “well why are you qualified to say this”, since this has gotten way out of my usual circles: hi, I’ve been working trust and safety/ToS on social media for 20 years now. I am never, ever the person with the worst stories when I go out drinking with others.
/end id]
If you’re doubting this the thing you have to remember is that stranger kidnapping is very rare, for either children or adults. The vast majority of the time, when someone is kidnapped or held against their will, it’s by someone they already know, someone close to them: a parent, a partner, that sort of thing. So if someone has been kidnapped or whatever, the people closest to them (who are usually the ones to put up missing posters and whatnot) should be the first suspects, not the last. It’s possible that the person putting up the missing person fliers is the parent who has custody and the noncustodial parent kidnapped the kids … but it’s just as possible that the person putting up fliers is the noncustodial parent who is doing this as part of a plot to find the kids so they can kidnap them. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
And when people choose to leave voluntarily and cut all contact with people close to them, they don’t just do it on a whim. There’s pretty much always a reason. For example, the people they’re cutting contact with might be shitty and abusive. Now, the reason might also be “the person leaving is messed up by drugs” or whatnot, or “they’re being forced by an abuser to cut contact.” Those are also reasons. But a lot of people who cut contact with someone in their life do it for very good and valid reasons. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
rb this version with image descriptions please
remember this especially now with so many trans and gay people fleeing states that are passing anti lgbtq laws
i guarantee there’s going to be homophobic families saying their “mentally disturbed family member” is missing
All the fucking time in Facebook groups for my local area we’ll get parents looking for their “missing kids” who turn out to be 18 to 30(!!) year olds that cut ties for a reason.
at the peak of my fevery delusions earlier i tried to explain to my wife how there is a "different shadow tumblr" that i accidentally accessed but can't anymore somehow and i wanted to get back on shadow tumblr
by Amy Castor and David Gerard
featuring the funniest graph in cryptocurrency this year
reread worm and i still cant believe all parahumans just have little worms in their very high updos puppeting them like remy ratatootie
Yes I followed the yudkowsky to worm pipeline
Yes I simply stopped giving a shit about rationality in media
We exist
I can't find the post but it said something like "biphobia will have bi women believe that society wants them to be lesbians, and lesbophobia will have lesbians believe that society wants them to be bi, but the truth is society doesn't want you to be bi or lesbian. they want you to be straight" or something like that. I saw it for the first time years ago and it's stuck with me because this mindset will genuinely resolve so much of queer infighting.
Allosexual queer people will believe that society wants them to be ace and aces will believe that society wants them to be allosexual queers, and the truth is society wants you to be allosexual but only sexually attracted to the right gender in the right way.
Trans men will believe that society wants them to be nonbinary, and nonbinary people will believe that society wants them to be binary trans, and the truth is society wants you to be cis.
And the thing is, there's some truth to "I would be more accepted if I was [this queer identity] instead of [that queer identity]," because there are groups of people who will want you to be a different queer identity. There are people who want their lesbian daughters to be bi because then they have a chance of marrying a man. There are allosexual gays who want to be ace because at least then they wouldn't be sexually attracted to their own gender, which is dirty and gross and wrong. There are people who want their trans male friends to be nonbinary because they think men are all evil.
Except there are also people who would rather bi women be lesbians because dating men makes them a traitor to the queer community, or aces who want to be allosexual and gay because if they can't be attracted to the opposite gender at least they'll be attracted to someone, and people who want their nonbinary friends to be binary trans because nonbinary people are made up and stealing resources.
Society at large doesn't want you to be any queer identity. They have a very narrow idea of what you should be, and so many ideas and rules telling you what you shouldn't be. And sometimes, people unlearn some of those rules but not others, depending on who they're around while forming these opinions. Some people will unlearn exorsexism but still drink the "men are evil" juice. Some people will unlearn homophobia but not amatonormativity.
So, sometimes queer people say things like "People would accept me more if I was [different queer identity]." And sure, some people would accept you more if you were that other identity. Except some people would accept you less. Maybe your parents would accept you more if you were bi instead of lesbian, but your friends would say being bi makes you a traitor.
And in the end, it doesn't matter, because there's way to win. "More accepted" is a very relative term. More accepted by some people, sure, but you won't be really be accepted unless you're not queer.
This is really really true. I’m saving this and keeping it to read for all the times *I* catch myself feeling this way, and sharing it because it’s something pretty much every LGTBQIA+ person could do with internalising.